Netaji, who had been lying as still as a corpse, suddenly perked up when he heard ‘SDO’. Salimpur had its own SDO, who was in effect administrative prince of this fief. A visit from a Sub-Divisional Officer of a different subdivision was news indeed.
‘It must be the archives,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I heard someone saying that someone was being sent over from somewhere to look at them.’
‘You donkey,’ said Netaji, before falling back exhausted onto the bench, ‘it’s nothing to do with the archives. It has to do with coordinating the process of notification in the various subdivisions once the Zamindari Act comes into force.’
In fact Netaji had no idea why the SDO was in town. But he decided immediately to make it his business to meet him.
A spindly schoolteacher also dropped in for a few minutes, made the sarcastic comment that he did not have the whole day to spend in idle chatter like some people he knew, looked at the prone figure of Netaji with contempt, frowned slightly and quizzically at Maan, and left.
‘Where’s the guppi?’ the Bear asked suddenly. No one knew. He had disappeared. He was found a few minutes later, staring in slack-jawed fascination at a display of bottles and pills that an aged quack doctor had arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the street. A crowd had gathered, and was listening to the quack’s patter as he held up a bottle containing an opaque and viscous lime-green liquid: ‘And this amazing medicine, truly a panacea, was given to me by Tajuddin, a great baba, and very close to God. He spent twelve years in the jungles of Nagpur, eating nothing – he just chewed leaves for their moisture, and kept a stone against his stomach for food. His muscles rotted, his blood dried, his flesh wasted away. He was mere bone and black skin. Then Allah said to two angels, “Go down and give him my salaams” –’
The guppi, who was staring open-mouthed and listening with absolute conviction to this nonsense, almost had to be dragged away from the scene and back into the shop by the Bear.
10.2
AS the tea, paan and newspaper went around, the conversation turned to politics at the state level, especially the recent communal troubles in Brahmpur. The prime object of hatred was the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, whose defence of the police firing on the Muslim mob near the Alamgiri Masjid had been widely reported in the newspapers – and who was known to be a strong supporter of the construction – or, as he would have had it, re-construction – of the Shiva Temple. Rhymed slogans such as the following, which were popular in Brahmpur among the Muslims, had found their way to Salimpur and were repeated with relish:
Saanp ka zahar, insaan ki khaal:
Yeh hai L.N. Agarwal!
The poison of a snake, the skin of a man:
This is L.N. Agarwal!
Ghar ko loot kar kha gaya maal:
Home Minister Agarwal!
He robbed our Home, and devoured our substance:
Home Minister Agarwal!
This might have been a reference to his ‘cold steel’ order, under which over-zealous policemen had confiscated not merely axes and spears but even household knives, or it might have referred to the fact that L.N. Agarwal, being a member of the Hindu shopkeeping community, was the most important collector of funds for the Congress Party of Purva Pradesh. His origins were also referred to slightingly in the following slogan:
L.N. Agarwal, wapas jao,
Baniye ki dukaan chalao!
L.N. Agarwal, go back,
Go and run your bania’s shop!
The walls, however, might have echoed the uproarious laughter that greeted this final couplet at the expense of the laughers themselves. For it was taking place in a shop, and Maan, being a khatri, was no stranger to trade.
In sharp contrast to L.N. Agarwal, Mahesh Kapoor, though a Hindu, was well-known for his tolerance towards other religions – his wife would have said that the only religion he was intolerant towards was his own – and was liked and respected among knowledgeable Muslims. This was why, for example, when Maan and Rasheed first met, Rasheed had been well-disposed towards him.
He now said to Maan: ‘If it were not for people like Nehru at the national level, or your father at the state level, the situation of the Muslims would be even worse than it is.’
Maan, who was not feeling particularly well-disposed towards his father, shrugged.
Rasheed wondered why Maan was being so inexpressive. Perhaps, he thought, it was the way he had put it. He had used the words ‘the situation of the Muslims’ rather than ‘our situation’ not because he did not feel a part of his community, but because he examined even an issue as close to his heart as this through almost academically balanced categories. It was his constant habit to try to make objective sense of the world, but of late – especially since his rooftop discussion with his father – he felt more and more disgusted by it. He had hated his own deception – or perhaps prevarication – with the patwari, but knew that he had had no alternative. Had the patwari believed that Rasheed’s family was not behind him, nothing would have protected Kachheru’s right to his land.